Mini-reviews

Abandon The Old In Tokyo by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Abandon the Old in Tokyo is manga, but not as we know it. Tatsumi's downbeat and pessimistic tales of life in post-war Japan bear no trace of fantasy, wish-fulfilment, or cliché. If anything, they are perhaps a little too off-beat, a little too willing to refuse the expected resolution; but this boldness is refreshing enough to offset the lack of straightforward narrative satisfaction. Tatsumi's passive, hapless protagonists stumble through life, never fortunate, seldom content, ground down by the unfairness of life. His stories are reminiscent of the films of Hiroshi Teshigahara; "The Hole" in particular reminds me of Woman of the Dunes. Tatsumi doesn't quite reach Beckettian levels of profundity, but the sharpness of his vision is undeniable.

East Coast Rising volume 1 by Becky Cloonan

East Coast Rising starts with a rip-roaring action sequence and rarely lets up; the setting is a near-future flooded America, sort of like Waterworld only not rubbish. Cloonan's fresh and vivid art style underpins a thin but still entertaining story. It's a pirate comic, basically, but the futuristic setting liberates it from the usual clichés of the pirate story: no pieces of eight, no parrots, no monkeys. Great fun.

Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl by Satoru Akahori, Yukimaru Katsura; character designs by Sukune Inugami

The quirky premise of this manga -- the sensitive boy Hazumu is transformed into a girl by visiting aliens -- could have been taken in any number of directions. It could have been a highly politicized examination of gender roles, or an angst-ridden account of a boy being abandoned by his friends once he becomes a girl. It isn't either of these things: Satoru Akahori uses the set-up as an excuse for a lesbian love triangle between the newly female Hazumu, her tomboy best friend Tomari, and Yasuna, the girl who rejected him as a boy -- but is much more interested in her as a girl. There are some off-notes in this volume -- the teacher who keeps passionately declaring that she's 35 and has never had a boyfriend is presumably supposed to be funny, since she doesn't serve any other purpose, but she just comes across as a loon, and the aliens go so far into "quirky" that they overshoot into "unbelievable". I'm not sure I'd have bothered, except that Yukimaru Katsura has a fine, delicate line that I find soothing to the eye, and if I want to read comics about girls or women falling in love, I don't have that many options. Anyway, Kadashima's satisfying on its own terms even if they don't do as much with the gender issues as I might have liked, and Yasuna's complete inability to see men as anything more than a grey blur is intriguing. I'll probably stick with this for the next volume.

Kings In Disguise by James Vance and Dan Burr

One of the freebie comics I've been handed lately was the graphic novel Kings In Disguise, originally published in the 1980s and now available in a collected edition from W. W. Norton & Co. Set in the USA in the 1930s, Kings In Disguise tells the story of Freddie Bloch, a young Jewish boy from a small town in California. Circumstances force Freddie on to the road, and he falls in with various hoboes and travellers, especially one who calls himself "the King of Spain" and who becomes a kind of surrogate father to Freddie. The "kings in disguise" take rides on freight trains, and they walk for miles in threadbare shoes, and they sleep in flophouses and on the side of the road, looking for a break, a job, or a welcoming community; but in the middle of the Depression, there's not much luck or kindness going around, and while Freddie finds some solidarity and hints of a better and truer vision than that contained in the Horatio Alger books his father once gave him, it becomes clear before long that the forces of society are arrayed against that vision. Yet Freddie retains his loyalty to his friends and his integrity. Along the path the book describes, he falters and makes mistakes, but in the end his head is bloodied but unbowed, and he refuses to betray those who have helped him. Kings In Disguise is straightforwardly good storytelling about the kind of people who tend to be overlooked; it's resonant, honest and uncompromising. Highly recommended.

Menkui! volumes 1-3 by Suzuki Tanaka

A rare example of a shounen-ai manga that didn't make me want to throttle the creator once. (Okay, unless you're counting the omake in vol 1 that's all about the "funny" incest; but that's not part of the main story so I'm choosing to pretend it doesn't exist.) The word "menkui" literally means "face-eater", but it doesn't mean one of those critters from Alien; no, a menkui is a person easily taken in by appearances, a sucker for a pretty face. Our hero Kotori is a bit of a menkui, so it's not surprising that he falls for the gorgeous Akaiwa. Since he's the least good-looking boy in his class (which is not saying much, since by a bizarre demographic accident his class is entirely populated by suspiciously gorgeous boys), Kotori has trouble believing that Akaiwa could fall for him, too... but he does. It's all terribly sweet, but not saccharine; low-key fluffy fun with occasional diversions into fantasy to add bulk. Almost half of vol 3 is taken up by two non-shounen-ai[1] short stories by Tanaka which showcase a skill in evoking atmosphere and setting that I'd love to see exercised at greater length.

[1] Well, there's subtext, but you have to squint.